Nearly every ranking of economics journals uses citations to measure and compare journals’ research impact. Raw citation data, however, include a number of factors that generally are thought to mismeasure impact. For example, under the view that a citation in a top journal represents greater impact than a citation elsewhere, it is usual to weight citations according to their sources. The most common means by which weights are derived is the recursive procedure of Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) (henceforth LP), which handles the simultaneous determination of rank-adjusted weights and the ranks themselves.

Alas, the lists to be used by the ARC in assessing research under the ERA (including the economics list) have eschewed this approach. Instead, they’re using the pre-1984 method of ranking journals by asking senior people in the field wot they reckon.